The Sins of Mason Thurlow volume 1

My publisher, Rebecca J Vickery, said she and her staff were working on a marketing strategy for this first in the new series a week or more ago, and as part of it, the novel would be released to Amazon.com exclusively for the first 3 months of its life.

I have to hand it to Rebecca and co: I saw it debut in Amazon’s top 100 at 98 not many hours after its release; within an hour it had leaped to 69; now, two days later, it’s at 55.

That’s not bad considering all the books Amazon receive to publicise. In fact, I think it’s far better than any one of us anticipated!

This is a big thank you to Rebecca and staff – and also an opportunity for me to remind my readers that if they want to get a copy without paying a cent, they can go to http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C1L79GE anytime during the remaining two days of the Easter break, and it will be there.

It’s based around the world’s only successful slave uprising – in Haiti in the late 1700’s – which led to that island being governed by the non-white races even today. If you should find any point I’ve made or cited which doesn’t ring true if you should check, I’d be grateful if you’d let me know. I do like things to be accurate, and as all but one of my novels are set in the 1700-1800’s, that means a lot of research goes into each one.

No, I’m not trying to run a history course in secret by using my novels to house each lesson, guys, but simply trying, as best as I can, to give each novel a ring of truth by setting it in the time-period correctly, with reference to characters who were known to be alive during the period of each novel, and all those little details that go along with such research, such as whether, in my novel, they would have used matches to light their cigars or what they would have used if matches were not invented until after the end of the novel.

I enjoy research just as much as I enjoy writing each novel: there is so much interesting, and often surprising, matter that comes to light in situations like that.